11 Oct / An Empire of Women by Karen Shepard [in aMagazine: Inside Asian America]
As I read Karen Shepard’s debut novel, An Empire of Women, I couldn’t help thinking if the title was some sort of sarcastic joke, if not a blatant mistake, because the utter inadequacies of the three women who populate this novel hardly constitute an empire.
The story centers around three generations of women: Celine, her daughter Sumin, and Sumin’s daughter, Cameron. The three have come together at a family cabin in rural Virginia because Sumin’s boyfriend wants to do an article on Celine who is a photographer made famous by her controversial, often nude pictures of Cam as a young child. [Think Sally Mann’s early ‘90s black and white photos of her children, which Shepard claims as her initial inspiration in an author statement.]
For some inexplicable reason (one of many inexplicable-but-who-cares reasons), each of the three women wants custody of one Alice, a six-year-old Chinese child whose mother has returned to China, leaving the child indefinitely in the custody of Cam, who was the mother’s closet American friend. I couldn’t figure out why, but it really seemed to matter that this child was the only full-blooded Chinese in sight. All three women want the girl, most obviously because each wants to prove they can be a mother. Celine failed miserably with Sumin, as Sumin did with Cam – and Cam’s going to give it a heck of a shot without the benefit of childbirth (which obviously didn’t make a difference with Sumin and Celine). Ironically, none of these three women could even use the word “mother,” or any variation thereof, to refer to a maternal figure; the only time “mother” came out of anyone’s lips was when Alice alternated between a vehement, “you’re not my mother,” to a plaintive, “I want to call my mother.”
An empire of therapists would have a heyday with these characters: selfish, overblown artiste Celine of French and Chinese parents, who sacrificed her own mother to the tortures of the Cultural Revolution for the sake of her Art; ineffective, frozen Sumin, the result of Celine’s brief affair with another artist, who is a pathetic washout ferreting out other people’s secrets as she has no life of her own; and feisty, annoying Cam, born of Sumin’s affair with a Japanese assistant of Celine’s, who served as Celine’s model and muse as a child, who never escaped her grandmother’s controlling gaze even after she lost her “mystery” and therefore her usefulness.
Alice, as a more-or-less abandoned child, represents the hope for redemption for each of the three women. [Redemption from what, you ask? Me, too. I still come back to abysmally failed motherhood.] As her character is written, Alice is hardly a figure worth fighting for. But then these are desperate women, and themselves not very believable. One can only be relieved that these characters are fictional.
In her author statement, Shepard makes reference to her grandmother, the Chinese-born writer whose pen name is Han Suyin, author of some 20-plus books, perhaps best known for her autobiographical novel, A Many-Splendoured Thing. The book became the Academy Award-winning film, Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing, about the relationship between a hapa-doctor in Hong Kong and a renegade journalist. Shepard’s mother who was Han’s daughter, also wanted to be a writer, and now Shepard herself has become a writer. So certainly, there is a genetic predisposition. One can only hope her next time out, Shepard can tap more into her grandmother’s legacy.
Review: aOnline website, October 11 2000
Readers: Adult
Published: 2000